Heraclitean Firehttp://heracliteanfire.net
Harry Rutherford's BlogSat, 14 May 2016 17:12:47 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=5.0.31086244Basti by Intizar Husainhttp://heracliteanfire.net/2016/02/23/basti-by-intizar-husain/
http://heracliteanfire.net/2016/02/23/basti-by-intizar-husain/#respondTue, 23 Feb 2016 13:40:38 +0000http://heracliteanfire.net/?p=9083This is a Pakistani novel from 1979, set during Bangladesh’s war of independence from Pakistan, but with lots of flashbacks — to a pre-Partition life in India, to Partition and the migration to Pakistan — and dreams going further back still, to India’s First War of Independence.*

The earliest scenes of pre-Partition India are seen, through a child’s eyes, as idyllically multicultural, which makes Partition a sort of fall from grace. Partially that’s just the contrast between the innocence of the child and the cynicism of the adult; but there is a sense reading the book of a great deal of political and ideological energy being expended and great changes being achieved, and none of it making life appreciably better.

Politics aside, it’s just a very well-written novel (hat-tip to Frances W. Pritchett for the translation). As well as the flashbacks, parts of it are in the form of letters, diary entries and dreams. The result is atmospheric and impressionistic, and occasionally confusing, especially for those of us who don’t have the cultural context. But it has a very strong sense of place, a great eye for detail, well-drawn characters and natural-sounding dialogue.

This is the second book from Pakistan I’ve read for the Read The World challenge; I felt I ought to be able to do better than the last one (Kartography by Kamila Shamsie), which was fine but nothing special. Basti is a definite improvement.

]]>http://heracliteanfire.net/2016/02/23/basti-by-intizar-husain/feed/09083War with the Newts by Karel Čapekhttp://heracliteanfire.net/2016/02/23/war-with-the-newts-by-karel-capek/
http://heracliteanfire.net/2016/02/23/war-with-the-newts-by-karel-capek/#respondTue, 23 Feb 2016 10:41:11 +0000http://heracliteanfire.net/?p=9077This is satirical science fiction from 1936, about the discovery of a species of intelligent amphibian living in the sea next to a small island near Sumatra. The ‘newts’ are exploited and traded, initially as pearl fishers and then as cheap labour on massive marine construction projects, until they are present in huge numbers all around the world; and then — spoilers, I guess, but the clue’s in the title — they start fighting back.

I bought it because it was recommended on the Book Shambles podcast, but even so it turned out to be much more entertaining and readable than I expected. The satire is not as focussed as, say, Nineteen Eighty-Four; the biggest targets are colonialism and racism, with the trade in newts modelled on the slave trade, but along the way it takes pot shots at nationalism, capitalism, fascism, Hollywood, newspapers, scientists and much else.

I read the Robert and Marie Weatherall translation from 1936; I certainly enjoyed it, although Wikipedia suggests that the more recent Ewald Osers version is more highly regarded.

I did already have the Czech Republic ticked off for the Read The World challenge when I started — I’ve read Kafka and Hašek and whatnot — but this is the first Czech book I’ve read since then, probably.

]]>http://heracliteanfire.net/2016/02/23/war-with-the-newts-by-karel-capek/feed/09077The Palace of Dreams by Ismail Kadarehttp://heracliteanfire.net/2015/11/05/the-palace-of-dreams-by-ismail-kadare/
http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/11/05/the-palace-of-dreams-by-ismail-kadare/#respondThu, 05 Nov 2015 13:42:21 +0000http://heracliteanfire.net/?p=9055This is a novel written in communist Albania in 1981 but set in a fictionalised version of the Ottoman Empire in, I guess, the late 19th century. The protagonist, Mark-Alem, is from a family, the Quprilis, who are originally Albanian but are living in Istanbul and are prominent, powerful players within the Ottoman Empire.

The book follows his career working at the Tabir Sarrail — the Palace of Dreams — a huge office devoted to collecting, sifting and interpreting the dreams of people from all across the empire. Once a week, a single dream is chosen as the Master-Dream and delivered to the Sultan, along with its interpretation.

“The world has long recognised the importance of dreams, and the rôle they play in anticipating the fates of countries and of the people who govern them. You have certainly heard of the Oracle of Delphi in ancient Greece, and of the famous soothsayers of Rome, Assyria, Persia, Mongolia, and so on. […] Now this long tradition undoubtedly has its own importance, but it pales into insignificance beside the operations of the Tabir Sarrail. Our imperial State is the first in the history of the world to have institutionalized the interpretation of dreams, and so to have brought it to such a high degree of perfection.” […]

“The task of our Palace of Dreams, which was created directly by the reigning Sultan, is to classify and examine not the isolated dreams od certain individuals — such as those who in the past were for one reason or another granted the privilege, and who in practice enjoyed the monopoly, of prediction through the interpretation of divine omens — but the ‘Tabir’ as a whole: in other words, all the dreams of all citizens without exception.”

The Palace of Dreams was apparently banned in Albania on publication, and you can see why. As a piece of political commentary, it is necessarily somewhat oblique, as this quote from Kadare points out: “dissidence was a position no one could occupy, even for a few days, without facing the firing squad. On the other hand, my books themselves constitute a very obvious form of resistance”. Still, the vision of a government trying to reach right into the minds of all its subjects, of a huge sprawling bureaucracy devoted to tracking and recording people’s thoughts, the brutal interrogation of people who are unlucky enough to have ‘significant’ dreams, and the way the process is undertaken with great seriousness but seems to be completely arbitrary: it’s a pretty good metaphor for a totalitarian government.

I find it quite hard to think of this as a book written in my lifetime; it’s not just the setting, but tone and style. The most obvious comparison would be Kafka — there are descriptions of getting lost in the corridors of the Tabir Sarrail which are particularly reminiscent — but also someone like Bruno Schulz, perhaps. Early/mid C20th, anyway. Although this edition, which I picked up in a second-hand shop, was translated from the Albanian via the French, so I don’t know how that may have affected the nuances.

Still, it’s a striking fable. It’s very much built around one central concept, but it’s short enough that that’s not a problem.

The Palace of Dreams is my book from Albania for the Read The World challenge.

]]>http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/11/05/the-palace-of-dreams-by-ismail-kadare/feed/09055America’s Prisoner: The Memoirs of Manuel Noriega by Manuel Noriega and Peter Eisnerhttp://heracliteanfire.net/2015/09/07/americas-prisoner-the-memoirs-of-manuel-noriega-by-manuel-noriega-and-peter-eisner/
http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/09/07/americas-prisoner-the-memoirs-of-manuel-noriega-by-manuel-noriega-and-peter-eisner/#respondMon, 07 Sep 2015 16:29:00 +0000http://heracliteanfire.net/?p=9039Political memoirs should probably always be approached with a healthy scepticism. This one was written by a man in prison for drug-trafficking, so I approached it with a lot of uncertainty; especially since I don’t know enough about the politics of Central America in the 80s.

The book does provide some help in the form of Peter Eisner, the American journalist who ghost-wrote the main text, based on interviews with Noriega, and added an introduction, footnotes and endnotes which (as agreed in advance) Noriega did not have any say over. So that provides some useful context.

Noriega’s version of events is that he was nothing but a patriot, working for the good of the people of Panama, trying to avoid getting caught up in the shitshow of Nicaragua and Honduras, and trying to keep on the good side of both the Americans and the Cubans. He also says that the US invasion of Panama was based on nothing but political expediency, that the drug charges against him were trumped up, and that the Americans were up to their eyeballs in every nasty, dirty, shady thing that happened in Central America, including drug-running.

Now a lot of his accusations are clearly true; but of course that doesn’t mean it’s all true. So, for example, given the stuff we know the CIA and the DoD were getting up to in Central America — most famously, but not only, Iran-Contra — pretty much any accusation against them starts sounding plausible. And of course the invasion was political: the fact that they ousted an uncooperative government 12 days before the Canal Zone was due to be handed over to Panamanian control doesn’t seem like a coincidence. And the idea that they did it because Noriega was a Bad Man? Well, given the kinds of regimes the US propped up in Latin America, they clearly had a very high tolerance for brutal dictatorships when it was convenient. But then you can say the same about, say, Saudi Arabia and Iraq: support for the Saudis undermines any claim to a foreign policy designed to spread democracy, freedom and human rights; but whatever the real motivations for invading Iraq, that doesn’t alter the fact that Saddam Hussein was a genuinely terrible figure.

For what it’s worth, Eisner’s conclusion is that Noriega was clearly guilty of a lot of things — like rigging elections and intimidating the opposition — but that Panama was still comparatively stable and peaceful compared to most of its neighbours. And that if Noriega was running drugs, the trial did a poor job of proving it; it relied on testimony from informants within the US prison system who were rewarded for their testimony with reduced sentences, and potentially damning evidence about American government involvement was ruled either secret or inadmissible.

Who knows. I mean, somebody probably does, and if I did the research I might have a clearer idea; but I found the book interesting, even without knowing what to make of it. The tangled politics of the region, and the extent to which the US government was caught up in it, is fascinating. Presumably, now we’ve moved on from the Cold War to the War on Terror, the CIA is less involved in Central America than it used to be, but who knows what they’re now getting up to in, say, Yemen. Or Egypt, Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkey…

[Oh, yeah, I forgot to say: this is my book from Panama for the Read The World challenge.]

]]>http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/09/07/americas-prisoner-the-memoirs-of-manuel-noriega-by-manuel-noriega-and-peter-eisner/feed/09039Remnants: The Way of the Womb by Hagop Oshaganhttp://heracliteanfire.net/2015/08/24/remnants-the-way-of-the-womb-by-hagop-oshagan/
http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/08/24/remnants-the-way-of-the-womb-by-hagop-oshagan/#respondMon, 24 Aug 2015 16:07:16 +0000http://heracliteanfire.net/?p=9023This is my book from Armenia for the Read The World challenge. Oshagan was born in 1883 in what is now Turkey — then the Ottoman Empire — and this novel is set in the Armenian community in Turkey before the genocide. ‘The Way of the Womb’ is actually just the first volume of a three volume novel; the third, unfinished volume tells the story of the genocide itself.

The Way of the Womb works well enough as a stand-alone novel, but obviously it would be a very different experience to read the whole work. Even without any explicit references to the approaching horrors, the context is unavoidable. It creates both dark foreshadowing and an elegiac note for a lost world. Not that Oshagan presents the lost Turkish-Armenian life as a golden idyll — his characters are feuding and manipulative — but there’s a certain amount of stuff about straight-limbed, strong Armenian youths living simple, honest lives among the olive groves, contrasting with an (understandably bitter) representation of weaker, more degenerate Turks.

This volume tells the story of a woman who, desperate to produce a grandson to continue the family name, is scheming to persuade her daughter-in-law to sleep with the hired help. That is used as a framing device to look back at the history of her family, the Nalbandians; once wealthy and powerful, built up by one man, Hajji* Artin, and in terminal decline in the generations after his death.

I would like to be more enthusiastic about this book. The story itself, the characters, and the setting, are striking and interesting. But reading it was really hard work. The prose is quite dense and difficult anyway; I often found myself having to reread sentences several times. But it is made much harder by a lack of white space. The framing story has some pretty long paragraphs, but at least it’s frequently broken up by dialogue. The flashback to tell the story of the Nalbandians is 60 pages without a single paragraph break. 60 pages! I assume that’s a reflection of the original Armenian, but it was a real struggle to get through it.

It’s a pity. I can see why this is an important book for Armenians, and there really were things I liked about it; but it was just too much of a chore. It’s possible that’s the fault of the translation, rather than the original text… but either way, I won’t be picking up the next two volumes, if they get translated. For once I can see the appeal of a Reader’s Digest Condensed version, just for sake of the story, if anyone feels like producing one.

* ‘Hajji’ is obviously a term they picked up from their muslim neighbours, but in their case it was apparently used to refer to someone who had made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

]]>http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/08/24/remnants-the-way-of-the-womb-by-hagop-oshagan/feed/09023The Colonel by Mahmoud Dowlatabadihttp://heracliteanfire.net/2015/08/03/the-colonel-by-mahmoud-dowlatabadi/
http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/08/03/the-colonel-by-mahmoud-dowlatabadi/#respondMon, 03 Aug 2015 10:55:35 +0000http://heracliteanfire.net/?p=9013Gosh, this book is grim. It starts with the colonel being summoned from his house in the middle of a rainy night to collect the tortured body of his daughter from the secret police, and he is told to bury her before daybreak to avoid any kind of attention.

The story of that night and the following day is combined with flashbacks, and we learn of one child after another lost to violence: being tortured by the Shah’s regime or the Islamic Republic, or dying in the Iran/Iraq War. Each of his children belongs to, and represents, a different political movement: different flavours of communism and Islamism. But they all fall foul of the government sooner or later, as the political tides change. Except, I guess, for the one who dies in the war, who is celebrated as a martyr — but is no less dead.

I don’t know enough about the politics of Iran in the 70s and 80s, so the historically specific detail is lost on me, but it still works as a portrayal of a country suffering political turmoil and violent repression. Certainly an effective novel, if not an enjoyable one.

]]>http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/08/03/the-colonel-by-mahmoud-dowlatabadi/feed/09013Tales in Colour and Other Stories and Bhutanese Tales Of The Yeti by Kunzang Chodenhttp://heracliteanfire.net/2015/07/07/tales-in-colour-and-other-stories-and-bhutanese-tales-of-the-yeti-by-kunzang-choden/
http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/07/07/tales-in-colour-and-other-stories-and-bhutanese-tales-of-the-yeti-by-kunzang-choden/#respondTue, 07 Jul 2015 11:32:47 +0000http://heracliteanfire.net/?p=9001Two collections of short pieces by the same writer, which I read as books from Bhutan for the Read The World challenge. I was intrigued to read the yeti stories but also wanted something more contemporary; in the event Tales of Colour is the more interesting book.

It was certainly interesting to read some yeti lore: I learned that they smell horrible and have hollow backs, for example. And it’s clear that they are regarded as magical/folkloric creatures rather than just another species of wild animal; people may believe they are real, but they are not just another wild animal like a bear. There are stories of women bearing them children, for example. But although I was pleased to get some sense of the yeti’s place in Bhutanese culture, the stories themselves were not especially fascinating; a selection of four or five of the best ones would have been enough for me.

Tales of Colour is a collection of short stories about everyday life for women in rural Bhutan, touching on alcoholism, illness, infidelity, the lure of the city, age… universal themes, really, and simple stories, but very well told and with a strong sense of place.

]]>http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/07/07/tales-in-colour-and-other-stories-and-bhutanese-tales-of-the-yeti-by-kunzang-choden/feed/09001Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War by Svetlana Alexievichhttp://heracliteanfire.net/2015/06/22/zinky-boys-soviet-voices-from-the-afghanistan-war-by-svetlana-alexievich/
http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/06/22/zinky-boys-soviet-voices-from-the-afghanistan-war-by-svetlana-alexievich/#respondMon, 22 Jun 2015 12:00:42 +0000http://heracliteanfire.net/?p=8992Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobylwas one of the best books I have read for the Read The World challenge, and so I thought I would read this as well. It is, again, a compilation of verbatim transcripts; presumably somewhat edited, if only to remove the interviewer’s questions and comments, but with the rhythms and untidiness of normal speech. This time, it is people associated with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan: soldiers, nurses, bereaved mothers and widows (although no Afghan voices). The title comes from the zinc coffins that were used to deliver bodies back home.

The English edition was published in 1992, and the introduction stresses the comparison with the US experience in Vietnam; soldiers returning home from an unpopular war and being told it was all a mistake, and the impact on the country’s self-image. There are of course also many differences. The USSR kept an iron grip on the news coverage, at least initially; this book’s publication in 1990 is symptomatic of the loosening up of the glasnost/perestroika era. It’s depressing to think how Putin’s government might respond to a similar book about Ukraine or Chechnya.

The other obvious parallel, of course, is with our own recent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. There is never a shortage of wars to write about, after all. In the end, that made this a less remarkable book, for me, than the Chernobyl one; it is not quite as unique and weird. But it is still fascinating and insightful, and I recommend it. I would just suggest trying to read it in small doses; I found when I read too much in one go, the individuality of the voices started to blur a bit.

» The photo of a Soviet helicopter-tank operation is from the Department of Defense publication Soviet Military Power, 1984, via Wikipedia. It’s a public domain image because it was created by the US government.

]]>http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/06/22/zinky-boys-soviet-voices-from-the-afghanistan-war-by-svetlana-alexievich/feed/08992The Radiance of the King by Camara Layehttp://heracliteanfire.net/2015/05/29/the-radiance-of-the-king-by-camara-laye/
http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/05/29/the-radiance-of-the-king-by-camara-laye/#respondFri, 29 May 2015 14:35:05 +0000http://heracliteanfire.net/?p=8984This is a novel from 1954 about Clarence, a white man who, finding himself broke and stranded in Africa, decides to approach the king and ask him for some sort of job. Clarence’s only qualification is that he is white — which admittedly was no small thing in colonial Africa — and after he fails to contact the king, he is taken under the wing of a beggar and two boys, and begins a journey south, hoping to meet the king again later when he visits that part of the country.

It’s a dreamlike, sensual narrative; I’ve noticed before that novels from Francophone Africa (Guinea, in this case) seem to be more stylised than those from former British colonies. It echoes and subverts the tradition of white men’s adventures into darkest Africa. Africa seen through Clarence’s eyes is a world of fetid scents, impenetrable jungle, and the buttocks and breasts of the women; but he is completely ineffectual and naive, dependent on and manipulated by those around him.

My first impressions of this were really good; I enjoyed it for the characterisation and description, atmosphere, nuance. For me it didn’t sustain that level of excitement though to the end, but it was still a very good read.

]]>http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/05/29/the-radiance-of-the-king-by-camara-laye/feed/08984Alexander McQueen at the V&Ahttp://heracliteanfire.net/2015/05/08/alexander-mcqueen-at-the-va/
http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/05/08/alexander-mcqueen-at-the-va/#respondFri, 08 May 2015 14:25:32 +0000http://heracliteanfire.net/?p=8973I went to see the McQueen show at the V&A — ‘Savage Beauty’, the same one that was previously at the Met — and it was terrific: enormously varied and inventive, with loads of striking and interesting stuff to look at. Being a bit sleep-deprived after staying up late to watch the election results come in (and what a depressing vigil that turned out to be), I did find it all a bit oppressive by the end; too much visual stimulus, loud music, dark rooms and spotlights. It’s the feeling I get when I’ve been in a supermarket for too long.

Still, the frocks were great. Like a lot of haute couture, much of it is spectacular but barely wearable, and it’s tempting to call it ‘theatrical’, although in fact theatre rarely has this kind of spectacular costume; and film perhaps even less so. It reminded me how terrific the Jean-Paul Gaultier costumes are in Fifth Element; it would be great if more films had that kind of extravagant visual aesthetic. Imagine a superhero movie with the costumes designed by Alexander McQueen, instead of the blandly, generically ‘cool’ versions that the studios manage to produce. Or one of the new Star Wars movies, or the Lord of the Rings; movies set in alien worlds where anything is possible, and with enough money to actually make these kind of incredibly labour-intensive costumes… wouldn’t it be great if they were just able to be a bit stranger, and more extravagantly individual?

I was slightly uncomfortable with some of the tribal-influenced collections though; I’m generally a bit wary of claims of cultural appropriation, just because throughout history, culture has always been invigorated by the mixing together of influences from different traditions. I understand why people are uncomfortable with white European fashion designers using ‘exotic’ influences in their designs in a rather unthinking way, but I think it can be done in a way which is fairly innocent — although as a white European man perhaps I’m just showing my biases.

However: taking a load of imagery from indigenous African and South American peoples, lumping it all together as ‘tribal’, combining it with animal imagery and throwing around a lot of rhetoric about primitivism and the noble savage… that is definitely the wrong way to do it.

]]>http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/05/08/alexander-mcqueen-at-the-va/feed/08973Down the Rabbit Hole by Juan Pablo Villaloboshttp://heracliteanfire.net/2015/04/03/down-the-rabbit-hole-by-juan-pablo-villalobos/
http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/04/03/down-the-rabbit-hole-by-juan-pablo-villalobos/#respondFri, 03 Apr 2015 12:46:16 +0000http://heracliteanfire.net/?p=8962I picked this up because it was around the house and I was looking for something to read, but it turns out the author is from Mexico, so I guess it’s my book from Mexico for the Read The World challenge.

This is a very short novel — 67 pages — narrated by Tochtli*, the young son of a drug dealer. He lives entirely surrounded by adults — a maid, a cook, two armed guards and a tutor — all of whom indulge his eccentricities out of fear of his terrifying violent father. He has a collection of hats and a desire to own a pygmy hippopotamus to go with his father’s various exotic animals, including two tigers.† The story really is of a child’s mind being warped by his surroundings; by his father’s lessons about how to be macho, and above all to avoid being ‘a faggot’, by his conversations with his father about how many shots it would take a to kill a man in different parts of the body, and by the evidence of corruption and sex and violence around him.

So at the start, although it’s disturbing the way he parrots his father, he still seems rather innocent; by the end you are wondering if it’s already too late for him, if he’s damaged beyond repair.

Having this horrible situation told in a child’s voice is an effective and creepy device. It’s also genuinely funny in a dark grotesque way. I enjoyed it.

*‘Tochtli’ is the word for rabbit in Nahuatl, and all the Mexican characters have Nahuatl animal names; so the father is called Yolcaut, ‘rattlesnake’, and so on.

» The photo is of the original entrance to Pablo Escobar’s hacienda. The plane is a replica of the one Escobar used to carry his first shipment of cocaine to the US. The hacienda is now a theme park; you can see the entrance in the background. “Pórtico Hacienda Nápoles” by XalD – Own work. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

]]>http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/04/03/down-the-rabbit-hole-by-juan-pablo-villalobos/feed/08962The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyŏng, translated by JaHyun Kim Haboushhttp://heracliteanfire.net/2015/03/30/the-memoirs-of-lady-hyegyong-translated-by-jahyun-kim-haboush/
http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/03/30/the-memoirs-of-lady-hyegyong-translated-by-jahyun-kim-haboush/#respondMon, 30 Mar 2015 10:11:31 +0000http://heracliteanfire.net/?p=8950This is a properly remarkable book. It is, as the subtitle explains, ‘The Autobiographical Writings of a Crown Princess of Eighteenth-Century Korea’. Lady Hyegyŏng* was married into the royal family; she married Sado, the Crown Prince, when they were both nine years old. Sado never became king — he was executed in 1762 at the age of 27 — but their son inherited the throne as King Chŏngjo. Remarkably, Hyegyŏng outlived him as well, and three of these four ‘memoirs’ were written after 1800, during the reign of her grandson King Sunjo.

So she had a long and eventful life, and it makes for fascinating reading. It’s sometimes a little difficult keeping track of who’s who: there’s a large cast of characters, the court intrigues are confusing, and the family relationships are complicated by the fact that the kings and princes have children by multiple women; some wives, some consorts. And because I’m unused to Korean names they all sound a bit the same to me. But it has a list of characters and some family trees, which helped.

The other complication is that these are four separate memoirs which overlap with each other. So the first (‘The Memoir of 1795’) is closest to the modern idea of a memoir, starting with her childhood and covering most of her life, but it carefully avoids any details about the single most important event: the execution of Prince Sado. The execution of the crown Prince by his father is so politically charged that she only alludes to it in the vaguest terms. Then the memoirs of 1801 and 1802 are more directly political; public advocacy aimed at defending the reputation of her father and brothers, who had fallen out favour after the death of Chŏngjo. And in the Memoir of 1805, she finally returns to the story of Sado, explaining that 40 years of silence has allowed false versions of events to take hold, and she believes it is important to tell what really happened.

And the story of Prince Sado is extraordinary. I don’t want to give all the details; I’m sure I enjoyed this book more because I was surprised and shocked by it. But the central fact of his execution is this: he was suffering from some kind of mental illness, and it progressed to the point that he was thought to be a credible threat to the life of the king. But because he was royal, custom forbade any method of execution that would disfigure the body, and poison would have implied he was a criminal; so he was shut into a rice chest and left to starve to death.

As you might imagine, this event traumatised the entire royal family in various ways; hence it being taboo to talk about it for four decades after it happened.

But although it was an extreme example, it also gives a hint of the brutality of court life. There are an awful lot of people who get banished to remote islands, or tortured or executed; usually for saying something which is perceived to be disloyal. That ‘disloyalty’, at least at this cultural distance, often seems to be based on terrifyingly slight nuances of speech.

So I found it fascinating as a portrayal of a time and place, and the whole story is positively Shakespearean.† But it is also much more readable than you might expect. If you skipped the two middle memoirs it would be a positive page-turner; not that they aren’t interesting, but they are harder work.

The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyŏng is my book from South Korea for the Read The World challenge. I’d still like to read some contemporary Korean fiction, it seems like a really interesting country at the moment. But this caught my eye, and I’m glad I read it. It’s fascinating.

*Or Hyegyeong, in the newer Revised Romanization which is the official standard since 2000 (this is all according to Wikipedia, obviously). Similarly, Chŏngjo = Jeongjo, etc. The book was published in 1985, so it uses the older McCune–Reischauer system.

†Genuinely, it was reading books like this, whether about historical kings or modern dictators, that helped me see Shakespeare’s plays in a new light; I always read them as psychological studies, family dramas that just happen to be set against a more glamorous background. But life in the court of an absolute ruler, like Stalin or King Yǒngjo or Elizabeth I, is really not a normal family situation. Unfortunately I only arrived at this insight after I finished studying Shakespeare at university.

» The portrait is of King Yǒngjo, Prince Sado’s father. I took it from Wikipedia.

]]>http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/03/30/the-memoirs-of-lady-hyegyong-translated-by-jahyun-kim-haboush/feed/08950Exhibition roundup: History is Now, Marlene Dumas, & Cotton to Goldhttp://heracliteanfire.net/2015/03/19/exhibition-roundup-history-is-now-marlene-dumas-cotton-to-gold/
http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/03/19/exhibition-roundup-history-is-now-marlene-dumas-cotton-to-gold/#commentsThu, 19 Mar 2015 16:50:52 +0000http://heracliteanfire.net/?p=8939The South Bank Centre is marking 70 years since the end of WW2 with a collection of events entitled Changing Britain. The Hayward Gallery’s contribution is an exhibition History Is Now: 7 Artists Take On Britain.

Filtering collective history through their individual perspectives, seven British artists of different generations and backgrounds – John Akomfrah, Simon Fujiwara, Roger Hiorns, Hannah Starkey, Richard Wentworth and Jane and Louise Wilson – each curate distinct sections of the exhibition and provide their unique ‘take’ on recent British history.

As you might imagine, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. John Akomfrah has selected a whole range of films from the Arts Council Film Collection, which I pretty much skipped, because who has the patience to watch seventeen different pieces of video art in a row? I hope some people do, but not me. Roger Hiorns has put together a whole exhibition of material related to the BSE crisis, arranged chronologically, and I found it really interesting to go back and revisit that period but I’m not sure I was responding to it as art — whatever that means. The only reason it couldn’t have been an exhibition at the Science Museum is that contemporary art has a willingness to be more boring — or at least dense and text-heavy — than a traditional museum would dare.

The two I enjoyed most were Hannah Starkey and Richard Wentworth. Hannah Starkey selected 70s, 80s and 90s photography from the Arts Council Collection, which she juxtaposed with commercial photography in a somewhat heavy-handed but still effective way. So glossy ads for fashion and booze were contrasted with grimy, peeling 1980s unemployment offices and so on. I don’t know if that contrast was absolutely necessary — the photographs would have been effective on their own — but it was still good. Richard Wentworth’s was the most crowd-pleasing section. To quote the blurb: ‘Through his eclectic selection of objects, artworks and artefacts Wentworth takes us from post-war austerity to the optimism of the 1950s and into the gloom and paranoia of the Cold War.’ So there was some art by people like Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, and Henry Moore, lots of press clippings, lots of old books which were thematically appropriate but also appealing for their mid-century graphic design, various objects like a 1950s TV, and most dramatically a decommissioned anti-aircraft rocket launcher out on the balcony.

Meanwhile at Tate Modern they have Marlene Dumas: The Image as Burden. Marlene Dumas is a South African artist who paints rough, blobby paintings, nearly all of people. I enjoyed it much more than I expected because the Tate have done a terrible job of marketing it. Or at least a terrible job of marketing it to me. All the pictures I’d seen made her work look dismal and unattractive, and quite a lot of it is a bit like that: lacking immediate visual appeal (which is not the same as being bad, but doesn’t make me rush to go and see it). Particularly, there are paintings in black ink which are dark and grey and miserable looking. But actually her larger oils are much more likeable, and some of them are even quite colourful. I didn’t come out of the exhibition as her biggest fan, but I certainly liked it more than I thought I would.

And at Two Temple Place is Cotton to Gold: Extraordinary Collections of the Industrial North West. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, there were some people in Lancashire making a hell of a lot of money from cotton mills and other industry. And some of them put that money into collecting historical manuscripts, or old coins, or beetles, or Turner watercolours, or Japanese woodcuts… With the result that there are apparently some particularly notable regional museums up there. But for the moment a lot of those coins and beetles and whatnot have been lent to Two Temple Place.

It’s an enjoyable kind of exhibition to visit: the building is attractive, entry is free, and if one cabinet leaves you cold, well, the next one will have something completely different. Last year they had a similar exhibition of items from the various University of Cambridge collections; I think that one was better, with more varied and more remarkable exhibits, but Cotton to Gold is enjoyably eclectic in the same way.

]]>http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/03/19/exhibition-roundup-history-is-now-marlene-dumas-cotton-to-gold/feed/18939The Epic of Askia Mohammed by Nouhou Malio, trans. Thomas A. Halehttp://heracliteanfire.net/2015/03/10/the-epic-of-askia-mohammed-by-nouhou-malio-trans-thomas-a-hale/
http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/03/10/the-epic-of-askia-mohammed-by-nouhou-malio-trans-thomas-a-hale/#respondTue, 10 Mar 2015 20:35:24 +0000http://heracliteanfire.net/?p=8926This is an interesting one: a piece of oral poetry, transcribed from a performance by a griot*, Nouhou Malio, in Niger. To quote the introduction:

The Epic of Askia Mohammed recounts the life of the most famous ruler of the Songhay empire, a man who reigned in Gao, an old city in present-day eastern Mali, from 1493 to 1528.

Although to be strictly accurate, it recounts the life of Askia Mohammed and some of his descendants. I was interested to learn that the events were recorded in contemporary written chronicles, so we have some sense of how the stories have changed over the centuries: the genealogies have been compressed a bit, and some historical events seem to have been conflated, but the people and events are clearly identifiable.

The subject matter fits comfortably into what you might expect of epic poetry: kings, conquest, revenge, wrangling over succession. But of course it also has cultural specifics; for example, Askia Mohammed is remembered for spreading Islam in West Africa, and one of his notable achievements was a pilgrimage to Mecca. Similarly, some of the second half of the poem is the story of Amar Zoumbani, one of Askia Mohammed’s descendants, and his ambivalent social position as the son of a king and a slave woman.

It’s enjoyable as a story — if you skip over some genealogies of the Bob begat Fred begat Kevin variety — but it doesn’t seem particularly remarkable as a piece of literature. It seems to be fairly plain, direct storytelling; there’s some interesting use of repetition for emphasis, but otherwise the way the language is used seems straightforward; with the inevitable caveat that some amount has been lost in translation. Most notably, the original switched occasionally from Songhay to a version of Soninké used as an ‘occult language’ by Songhay griots, healers and sorcerers, a language which is apparently sufficiently obscure that many lines are just marked as ‘undecipherable’. There’s also some suggestion in the introduction that Malio switched between dialects of Songhay, though I may be misunderstanding; what effect any of this code-switching might have is left unclear.

I kind of feel I should be drawing comparisons with other oral/epic poetry: Greek, Haida, Norse, or Anglo-Saxon, which is the only one I’ve actually studied. But nothing insightful is coming to mind, tbh.

]]>http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/03/10/the-epic-of-askia-mohammed-by-nouhou-malio-trans-thomas-a-hale/feed/08926Kvachi by Mikheil Javakhishvilihttp://heracliteanfire.net/2015/02/19/kvachi-by-mikheil-javakhishvili/
http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/02/19/kvachi-by-mikheil-javakhishvili/#respondThu, 19 Feb 2015 17:03:26 +0000http://heracliteanfire.net/?p=8904The original title of this book was Kvachi Kvachantiradze; presumably the publisher of the English edition thought that was a bit intimidating. With names like Javakhishvili and Kvachantiradze, it is of course my book from Georgia for the Read The World challenge.

It’s actually my second attempt for Georgia; I tried reading Avelum by Otar Chiladze, but didn’t finish it. I wondered at the time if it was a problem with the translation, but this had the same translator, Donald Rayfield, and was much more readable.

It’s a big fat novel — 523 pages; my heart sank slightly at the sight of it — but the blurb was promising:

This is, in brief, the story of a swindler, a Georgian Felix Krull, or perhaps a cynical Don Quixote, named Kvachi Kvachantiradze: womanizer, cheat, perpetrator of insurance fraud, bank-robber, associate of Rasputin, filmmaker, revolutionary, and pimp. Though originally denounced as pornographic, Kvachi’s tale is one of the great classics of twentieth-century Georgian literature — and a hilarious romp to boot.

And on the whole it lives up to that blurb. Obviously it’s not actually ‘hilarious’ — it is after all literary fiction — but I’ve long since learned that literary reviewers have very low standards for humour, and I know to make allowances. I would describe it as lively and entertaining.

Kvachi is quite an appealing character just for his dynamism and inventiveness, but he is a complete shit: he makes his way in the world entirely by lying, cheating and stealing, and has no redeeming qualities. The narrative largely consists of one swindle after another and a sequence of seduced and betrayed women, which would be too repetitive to sustain a 500 page novel; what keeps it interesting is the regular changes of backdrop.

So he starts from a humble background in Georgia in the 1890s; works his way up, via university in Ukraine, to the highest circles of Russian society, and ingratiates himself with Rasputin; things get difficult, so he moves on to France; he returns to Russia in time for the Great War and the Russian Revolution; he initially works within the revolution but in due course flees back to the briefly independent Georgia; soon revolutionary politics catches up with him and eventually he flees again.

The author, sadly, did not manage to escape Soviet politics himself. He was not sufficiently willing to keep to the party line, and was tortured and shot during Stalin’s Great Purge. It’s tempting in fact to see Stalin as a model for Kvachi; a Georgian, Ioseb Jugashvili, of humble origins, with intelligence and charisma but a complete ruthlessness, who worked his way to the top of Russian society.

But perhaps that’s a bit facile; there are no shortage of literary and historical models for a character like Kvachi. The blurb mentioned Felix Krull; you could think of Jonathan Wild or even Becky Sharp. A more recent parallel is Rácz from Peter Pišťanek’s brilliant (and genuinely funny) Rivers of Babylon.

» The photos are all from Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky’s amazing colour photographs of the Russian Empire in the 1910s, created using three separate black and white images, each taken with a colour filter, which can be recombined into a full colour image. You can find them at the Library of Congress website [woman, fish, bamboo]. I picked examples from Georgia, although the woman is stretching the point: she is in Armenian national dress and from a town which is now on the Turkish side of the border.

]]>http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/02/19/kvachi-by-mikheil-javakhishvili/feed/08904Stamping Grounds by Charlie Connellyhttp://heracliteanfire.net/2015/02/13/stamping-grounds-by-charlie-connelly/
http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/02/13/stamping-grounds-by-charlie-connelly/#respondFri, 13 Feb 2015 16:14:40 +0000http://heracliteanfire.net/?p=8898Full title: Stamping Grounds: Exploring Liechtenstein and Its World Cup Dream. It’s Connelly’s account of following the Liechtenstein national soccer team during their qualification matches for the 2002 World Cup. After my previous book from Liechtenstein for the Read The World challenge turned out not to be from Liechtenstein at all, this one is at least about the country, even if it’s written by an Englishman.

You can see why he thought it would be a good subject for a humorous football book; there is something fascinating about these tiny countries, fielding largely amateur teams that lose nearly every game they play and almost never score a goal. On the one hand, if you were an amateur playing your club football in the third tier of the Swiss league (Liechtenstein isn’t big enough to have its own league), it would be a terrific opportunity to play against some of the finest players in Europe in front of tens of thousands of people. But how do you cope, psychologically, with playing for a team that almost literally never wins a game?

The answer, perhaps not surprisingly, is that they adjust their expectations about what ‘success’ means. If they make their opponents work really hard to score, that’s a success; scoring themselves is a triumph. They didn’t in fact score in that campaign; their greatest moment in the book is losing only 0-2 to Spain at home. Which is admittedly impressive for a country with only 30,000 inhabitants, 10,000 of whom are foreigners who aren’t eligible for the national team.

In the end, though, the book was underwhelming. Liechtenstein just isn’t very interesting: it’s a tiny, mountainous country with an enviable standard of living, thanks to its healthy financial sector (i.e. it’s a tax haven); basically a microscopic Switzerland, without that country’s famous flamboyance. Connelly spends much of the book trying to work out what it means to be Liechtenstein, what distinct national character there is to separate it from Switzerland or Austria; it turns out there isn’t anything.

I think Connelly does a reasonable job with weak material; he gets chummy with some of the players, and interviews all the key members of the Liechtenstein FA, and tries to dig up a few local characters, but it feels a bit like squeezing blood from a stone.

]]>http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/02/13/stamping-grounds-by-charlie-connelly/feed/08898Food In England by Dorothy Hartleyhttp://heracliteanfire.net/2015/02/06/food-in-england-by-dorothy-hartley/
http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/02/06/food-in-england-by-dorothy-hartley/#respondFri, 06 Feb 2015 18:07:57 +0000http://heracliteanfire.net/?p=8893This is a magnificent book, written in 1953 by someone who learnt her cooking in English country kitchens in the days before widespread electricity and gas. It’s a combination of food history, recipes, general household advice, bits of personal memoir, opinion, and amusing or interesting quotes from old books.

Apart from the obvious stuff — what sauces to serve with mutton*, regional ways to cook a ham, the difference between Welsh, Scottish and West Riding Oatcakes — there are chapters about beekeeping, brewing, butter churns, as well as the chapters about the history of English food: what they ate at medieval feasts, how they stored food for long sea voyages. It really does conjure up a whole lost world: not just because of the foods which have fallen out of favour, like mutton or parsnip wine, but because the recipes pre-date a whole raft of exotic ingredients like aubergine and yoghurt.

It is endlessly quotable, but here are a few random extracts:

Blending Plants For ‘Tea’

It was during the acute rationing period that all these ‘teas’ were used in England to adulterate the imported teas.

A serviceable English ‘tea’ may be made with blackthorn for bulk, and sage, lemon balm, woodruff (the plant), and black-currant leaves for flavour. Do not omit at least three out of the four flavouring herbs, but let some flavour predominate. Thus, if currant and sage predominate, the tea will somewhat favour Ceylon; if the lemon balm predominates, it will be a more China cup; if the ‘woodruff’, it will have the smoky aroma of Darjeeling.

Eggs And Apple Savoury Or ‘Marigold Eggs’

This is Worcestershire and Oxfordshire, and probably very old.

Line a shallow dish with thin short crust, butter the bottom, and cover it with thinly sliced apples, and set it to bake until the apples are just cooked. Make a custard mixture of eggs beaten in milk, season strongly with pepper, salt and thyme, a very little chopped sage, and a lot of marigold petals (the common yellow marigold). Pour this savoury custard over the cooked apples and return it to the oven to bake until set. I was told it was served with roast pork, like Yorkshire pudding is served with roast beef (the sage and apple indicate this), but the marigold is more usually a cheese condiment.

Sheep’s Trotters With Oatmeal

Sheep’s trotters are the ceremonial part of the Bolton Wanderers football team dinners. Only the heavy types of mountain sheep, such as the Pennine Range sheep, can make this dish well. (I don’t think a sparrow could make a meal off a Welsh trotter, but in the larger breeds of sheep, the trotters are almost as meaty as a pig’s).

And I thought this was an appealing juxtaposition of headings:

Recipe Used for Whitewashing the White House at Washington

[…]

Whitewash as Made for an Anglesey Cottage

It’s a genuinely fascinating book both as history and gastronomy.

* Redcurrant jelly for valley breeds; barberry jelly for upland breeds; rowan jelly for Welsh and mountain mutton. ‘With the dull winter mutton of the garden lands, hot onion sauce is very comforting.’ Hot laver sauce (seaweed) and samphire with salt-marsh mutton. ‘Caper sauce is served with any of the sturdier types of garden mutton. In default of the imported caper, pickled nasturtium seeds are very good.’

]]>http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/02/06/food-in-england-by-dorothy-hartley/feed/08893Nora by Ferdinande von Brackel, translated by Princess Marie of Liechtensteinhttp://heracliteanfire.net/2015/02/05/nora-by-ferdinande-von-brackel-trans-princess-marie-of-liechtenstein/
http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/02/05/nora-by-ferdinande-von-brackel-trans-princess-marie-of-liechtenstein/#respondThu, 05 Feb 2015 13:21:36 +0000http://heracliteanfire.net/?p=8884This was supposed to be my book from Liechtenstein for the Read The World challenge. It was listed as Nora: A Novel from the German by Marie, Princess of Liechtenstein. All the companies selling it are ones that do ‘reproduction’ copies of scanned out-of-copyright books, complete with slight scanning errors and blemishes; which is a useful service, but the metadata tends to be a bit sketchy.

I did some googling, but couldn’t find any information about the book. But when sitting down to write this post I had one more go. And I discovered I had read a 360 page novel that was only translated by a Princess of Liechtenstein; and that the reason her English was so excellent was that her maiden name was Mary Fox. She actually sounds like an interesting character; she was a foundling adopted by Henry Fox, 4th Baron Holland who met Prince Louis of Liechtenstein in Naples. The Princely Family of Liechtenstein ‘initially refused to approve the marriage’.

Meanwhile the actual author is Ferdinande von Brackel, who doesn’t have much presence on the anglophone internet; her German Wikipedia page, via Google Translate, tells me:

The contemporary literary criticism she judged as the most talented and most important of the Catholic authors, whose creations […] at the best achievements of female literacy at all included (Hinrichsen, 1891). [5] As a writer with a strong interest in social questions, it published first During the war years 1864, 1866 and 1870 prussia friendly minded time poems.

So my novel from Liechtenstein is a novel from Germany, translated by a writer born in France and raised in London. All of which is slightly annoying — I wish I’d managed the detective work before reading it — but thankfully I rather enjoyed it. It’s a sentimental melodrama about a pair of star-crossed lovers, and it’s very dated — snobby, silly, and occasionally offensively anti-semitic — but I like a bit of soapy melodrama from time to time.

The lovers are a young German count and Nora, the daughter of a circus-rider. So that’s the social divide; but obviously that’s a bit radical, so her father is from a French noble family, has gentlemanly airs, and is very wealthy, as proprietor of the circus. And her genteel mother asks on her deathbed that Nora should be sent to be educated at the most exclusive convent school in Belgium.

And Nora, despite the stain of her background, is an absolute paragon of piety and decorum. She’s such a paragon that you might think the message of the book was: character is more important than earthly status, and that ancient names and noble titles are petty baubles next to a pure heart. But actually, even though most of the noble characters are fairly unpleasant, we’re left in no doubt that social class is Very Important. And while the nobles might be unsympathetic, the circus folk are positively subhuman with their vulgarity of taste and mind and morals.

It’s a lot of twaddle, really.

I was interested to learn some of Marie Fox’s biography though: as a Catholic foundling brought up in an aristocratic household whose marriage to a Prince is opposed by her husband’s family, you can see why she might see parallels to her own life in the story of a circus-rider’s daughter educated in a convent whose engagement to a German count is opposed by his family, and why she would like the idea that upbringing can triumph over humble origins.

Anyway, I will provisionally count it for the moment as my book from Liechtenstein, even though it’s a bit of a cheat. I mean I could spend twenty quid to read Prince Hans-Adams II’s thoughts on the place of the nation state in the C21st century, or sixty quid for Sieglinde Gstöhl’s The Neighbours of the European Union’s Neighbours, but I’m not enthused. Perhaps I’ll just read a jokey outsider’s book about Liechtenstein’s football team and call it a day.

]]>http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/02/05/nora-by-ferdinande-von-brackel-trans-princess-marie-of-liechtenstein/feed/08884Sigmar Polke at Tate Modernhttp://heracliteanfire.net/2015/02/04/sigmar-polke-at-tate-modern/
http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/02/04/sigmar-polke-at-tate-modern/#respondWed, 04 Feb 2015 11:57:00 +0000http://heracliteanfire.net/?p=8878I finally got round to visiting the Sigmar Polke retrospective at Tate Modern — it ends on Sunday — and it was enjoyable. Not so much because I absolutely loved the work; I liked quite a lot of it, but if there was another Polke exhibition next year, I wouldn’t be excited to see it. No, it was a good exhibition to visit because the work was varied, and going through thirteen rooms of work you’re lukewarm about, it helps if at least each room is a bit different.

So it started off with some Pop Art-esque commentary on consumerism and mass culture; there was work playing with the idea of the artist as Artist/egomaniac (with titles like Polke as Astronaut, and Polke as Drug-Pulverized Polke in a Glass Pipe); and commentary on the idea of Modern Art (“Malevich looks Down on Pollock”); then a 1970s hippy phase when he travelled around India and Afghanistan, took lots of drugs and made collages of pornography and psychedelic paintings with references to magic mushrooms, Alice in Wonderland and Mao; a series of watchtower paintings which used a stencilled design of a hunting watchtower to reference both Nazi prison camps and the Iron Curtain; there were some big paintings using unusual materials like neolithic stone tools and meteorite dust… and so on.

I’m often aware how much my reaction to works of art is dependent on factors which are extrinsic to the work itself: if the exhibition is too small, I might get all the way through it without ever getting into the right mindset. If it’s too big, it doesn’t matter what they put in the last few rooms, because my concentration will be gone — something that happened at the Late Turner exhibition at Tate Britain recently. It’s much more difficult to engage with the work if the gallery is too crowded, or there are lots of small works so you are constantly in mini queues to look at them, or if there’s a group of schoolchildren bringing out the terrible acoustics of big unfurnished rooms. Or you can simply be in a bad mood or a good one.

In the case of the Polke, the exhibition was almost too big; but it wasn’t too busy, the works were large and varied, and the schoolchildren were old enough to keep their voices down, so it was a pleasant experience. But there’s something odd about reviewing an art exhibition as though it was a bed and breakfast (a little bit cold in the Turbine Hall, but lovely views of the St Paul’s…).

Anyway.

One other thing I thought was interesting was a curatorial decision. On the website the blurb says:

He worked in off-the-wall materials ranging from meteor dust to gold, bubble wrap, snail juice, potatoes, soot and even uranium, all the while resisting easy categorisation.

It’s the ‘snail juice’ I want to pick out. In the exhibition itself it calls it something like ‘dye made from crushed snails’. But when you read the label next the painting in question, it turns out to be Tyrian Purple. That is, the highly prized dye of classical antiquity that was used by the Romans to colour their ceremonial togas. Which is indeed made from crushed snails; but referring to it that way, without any hint of the cultural context, seems, you know, weird.

» The image is Girlfriends, 1965/66, from the Froehlich Collection, Stuttgart. See lots more of Polke’s work in this review of the exhibition when it was in New York.

]]>http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/02/04/sigmar-polke-at-tate-modern/feed/08878The Wanderer by Jane Hollandhttp://heracliteanfire.net/2015/02/01/the-wanderer-by-jane-holland/
http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/02/01/the-wanderer-by-jane-holland/#commentsSun, 01 Feb 2015 17:03:43 +0000http://heracliteanfire.net/?p=8870This, according to the blurb, is a ‘controversial reworking’ of the famous Anglo-Saxon poem of the same name*. ‘Controversial’ and ‘famous’ are both relative terms here, of course.

I assume the controversy mainly arose because the poem is given a female narrator. To quote the introduction:

I also transformed the male ‘Wanderer’ of the poem’s title into a female figure and focused on that narrator alone, even though the original poem seems occasionally to suggest two distinct speakers. (A point on which some academics disagree.) This rather drastic change was made for two reasons. Firstly, the traditional male-male relationship of the lord and his faithful retainer takes on a strongly homoerotic charge when read with a modern sensibility and, writing as a female poet, this posited relationship lacked authenticity in my early drafts. Secondly, I originally undertook this translation to provide a centrepiece to my third poetry collection, Camper Van Blues, which is itself themed around the concept of a lone female traveller.

I think the change works well. The themes of exile and loss take on a slightly different flavour but work just as well with a female narrator. It makes it a different poem, but it’s not as radical a change as you might imagine.

There are two other notable tweaks to the poem. The first is to strip out the Christian imagery. Holland reads The Wanderer as an essentially secular poem with ‘artificially imposed religious overtones’, which is certainly an entirely plausible reading; others have found it to be deeply infused with a Christian sensibility.

The third change, which I thought was perhaps more striking than either of those, was the inclusion of a few modern references. Not that many of them, but for example in the description of men lost in battle, she writes [every other line is supposed to be indented]:

Some fell there in the line of duty,
caught off-guard in the crossfire; others
were blasted to bits at the roadside
or picked off by snipers

The Wanderer deals with that essential Anglo-Saxon theme of a world in decline, and living among the evidence former glory. Taking that idea and setting it in a modern world gives the poem a remarkable post-apocalyptic feel. I’d never made that connection before, between Anglo-Saxon poetry and, say, Mad Max; but actually it’s surprisingly apt.

Anyway, I’m generally in favour of people doing interesting reinterpretations of the classics, and I think this is completely successful. It does bring something new, but it also captures the gloomy beauty of the original.

* My awful pedantic soul (it’s a terrible affliction) requires me to point out: I’m pretty sure the title is a modern addition, like all the titles we give Anglo-Saxon poems.

]]>http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/02/01/the-wanderer-by-jane-holland/feed/18870Voices II: Contemporary Bahraini Short Stories, ed. & trans. Hasan Marhamah Bras, Boys, and Blunders: Juliet & Romeo in Bahrain by Vidya Samsonhttp://heracliteanfire.net/2015/01/31/voices-ii-contemporary-bahraini-short-stories-ed-trans-hasan-marhamah-bras-boys-and-blunders-juliet-romeo-in-bahrain-by-vidya-samson/
http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/01/31/voices-ii-contemporary-bahraini-short-stories-ed-trans-hasan-marhamah-bras-boys-and-blunders-juliet-romeo-in-bahrain-by-vidya-samson/#respondSat, 31 Jan 2015 16:43:45 +0000http://heracliteanfire.net/?p=8852I found these two books from Bahrain for the Read The World challenge, and I bought both because I thought they might offer an interesting contrast.

The Gulf states seem like a fascinating part of the world at the moment, but the rule I set myself — that books should ideally be by people who are actually from the relevant countries — is not helping. These are tiny countries with small publishing industries that do not translate a lot into English; and they have some pretty autocratic governments that probably restrict the kinds of things that can be published at all.

So if I want to find books that address the full weirdness of the Gulf — the pouring of unimaginable amounts of money into international sport; the way that Dubai manages to be an autocratic Islamic state while also a favoured holiday destination of European playboys; the fact that Qatar has a population of 1.8 million, of whom only 278,000 are citizens; the planned outposts of the Guggenheim and the Louvre; the… ambiguous position of Saudi Arabia in the War on Terror — well, I’m probably going to have to look for something written by an outsider.

Vidya Samson is an outsider, and does provide an interesting perspective, although not the kind of perspective that would offer insight into, say, Qatar’s winning bid for the 2022 FIFA World Cup. Bras, Boys, and Blunders: Juliet & Romeo in Bahrain is a teen romantic comedy about an Indian girl going to a multicultural Catholic school while her parents are working in Bahrain. At the school, white students have automatic cool status while the Indians and Pakistanis are at the bottom of the pecking order, mocked by the Arabs for their accents. Our heroine is a naive, shy girl dealing with boys, flat-chestedness, her parents; it’s fairly standard stuff, apart from the unusual setting. I’m clearly not the target market for this book, but it was likeable enough.

Hasan Marhamah is apparently Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Bahrain, which surprises me: partly because Voices II: Contemporary Bahraini Short Stories is lacking things like author bios or even publication dates for the stories, which is the kind of thing you might expect an academic to include. But especially because the English isn’t very good. There are quite a few errors of grammar, and more often the language is just clunky and unidiomatic:

As he bulged his eyes on the road, distressing blows recurred as if broiling him on calm fire. In the extreme hectic traffic commotions, and while his feet hesitated to move, a genius idea struck into his head; a difficult idea, but he would execute it. […] Fear choked the depths of his throbbing heart. The road ambience looked like a cemetery waiting for a coffin to carry him. He could not see any more but could hear the caution horns of the angry car drivers as he drew in his mind the picture of death. A rough hand prevented his advancement and a voice in a strong military tone addressed him…

When I was reading the first story, I seriously doubted that I would make it through the whole book, but actually I found if I read it quickly, and tried not to get hung up on individual sentences, it wasn’t too bad. The more straightforward the story, the better it worked; anything too poetic or ambiguous was much more difficult. A badly translated stream of consciousness is hard going.

Still, prose style aside, reading the stories for their content was interesting. For example, love stories are interesting in a culture where contact between men and women is restricted; there are stories about extreme poverty; there were several stories about divorce. Of course I knew that it was very easy for men to divorce their wives under Islamic law, but I’d never really thought about how brutal it could be for the wives and children, that men could just set them aside and move on to new women. Which is a failure of empathy on my part, admittedly.

]]>http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/01/31/voices-ii-contemporary-bahraini-short-stories-ed-trans-hasan-marhamah-bras-boys-and-blunders-juliet-romeo-in-bahrain-by-vidya-samson/feed/08852Exotic Territory: A Bilingual Anthology of Contemporary Paraguayan Poetry, ed. & trans. Ronald Haladynahttp://heracliteanfire.net/2015/01/29/exotic-territory-a-bilingual-anthology-of-contemporary-paraguayan-poetry-ed-trans-ronald-haladyna/
http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/01/29/exotic-territory-a-bilingual-anthology-of-contemporary-paraguayan-poetry-ed-trans-ronald-haladyna/#respondThu, 29 Jan 2015 14:49:00 +0000http://heracliteanfire.net/?p=8841This is my book from Paraguay for the Read The World challenge. I previously bought a copy of I, the Supreme by Augusto Roa Bastos, but that’s a fat dense modernist novel and it defeated me.

I always find it frustrating reading poetry in translation. I mean, even with English-language poetry I often find myself uncertain, not knowing what to think; with translations you get the added bonus that you know that something will be missing, but you never know what.

And with a selection of different poets but only one translator, there’s the added worry that the influence of the translator will make them all sound alike.

In other words: nothing here grabbed me the way that poetry sometimes can. But there were certainly things to enjoy. And in fact I’ve been enjoying dipping in and out for this post more than I did on the first read-through.

Much of the poetry is political; Paraguay has been under some variety of dictatorship for most of its history, most notably under Alfredo Stroessner from 1954-89, and there are poems about repression and violence; here’s a short one about Stroessner, by Jacobo Rauskin:

Alfredo Ages

The effigy sustained
by a thousand standard bearers
loses its force and colour.

The years attenuate
the militant rictus
and the great bully
looks old in the sun.

But there is poetry on a variety of themes, including the usuals: poetry, love, death, nature. Rain seems to be a recurrent image. Here’s one by Joaquín Morales, picked semi-randomly because I quite like it and it’s short enough to type out:

Still Life, 1

It’s not the partridges with their eyes
probably bursting out,
nor the bouquet of their legs
mingled with aromatic herbs;
nor the clay vase
that clearly shows
the prints of the fingers that molded it;
not even the dark,
irregular boards of the table,
whose veins and nodules still retain
the aroma of the forest:

not the old theme of appearance and reality,
nor the one of time briefly detained in brush strokes
that memory vivifies and recomposes:

perhaps — though certainty is almost impossible —
perhaps it’s the complete apprehension
of a yellow reflection in a small dark beak.

A bit of a mixed bag, then, which perhaps is what anthologies should be; but certainly quite a lot of things I liked.

]]>http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/01/29/exotic-territory-a-bilingual-anthology-of-contemporary-paraguayan-poetry-ed-trans-ronald-haladyna/feed/08841Crossing the Atlantic Ocean in Search of Happiness by Amadou Ndiayehttp://heracliteanfire.net/2015/01/26/crossing-the-atlantic-ocean-in-search-of-happiness-by-amadou-ndiaye/
http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/01/26/crossing-the-atlantic-ocean-in-search-of-happiness-by-amadou-ndiaye/#respondMon, 26 Jan 2015 11:10:13 +0000http://heracliteanfire.net/?p=8828This is my book from Mauritania for the Read The World challenge. It tells the story of Baba, a teenager who risks his life in a crowded refugee boat to start a new life in Spain.

A geographical aside: the book kept talking about taking a small boat from Mauritania to Spain, which seemed staggering. It eventually became clear that the boats from Mauritania go to the Canary Islands rather than the Spanish mainland: a still-terrifying 500 miles across the Atlantic rather than the 1300 miles I was imagining.

It’s a self-published novel by a Mauritanian student who studied in the US on a Fulbright scholarship. According to the blurb, ‘Amadou is one of the first students from his country to write a fiction novel’. And I hate to be negative about a first novel written in the author’s second language*, but it’s not a good advertisement for self-publishing.

It’s badly in need of a copy-editor, which is mildly annoying but forgivable. More importantly, it’s not well-written.The dialogue, characterisation, plotting… it’s all just clumsy and obvious. Which is a great pity, because this is exactly the kind of subject that is badly underrepresented in fiction; if someone could write a really good novel about the experiences of illegal African immigrants to Europe, I would be thrilled to read it.

I don’t know if Ndiaye would have done better for his first novel to have written about the experiences of a Mauritanian student studying in the Appalachians, which would also be a potentially interesting subject, I would think.

Anyway, despite its weaknesses, I’m glad this book exists; the boom in self-publishing is really helping me with reading around the world.

* Third? Fourth? I’m guessing he would have one of the African languages, plus French and maybe some Arabic?

]]>http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/01/26/crossing-the-atlantic-ocean-in-search-of-happiness-by-amadou-ndiaye/feed/08828RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch 2015http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/01/24/rspb-big-garden-birdwatch-2015/
http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/01/24/rspb-big-garden-birdwatch-2015/#respondSat, 24 Jan 2015 11:29:27 +0000http://heracliteanfire.net/?p=8823It’s citizen science time again. I got thirteen species this year, which is actually about par; my record is nineteen, but I’ve had several years which were much worse.

Carrion Crow × 3
Magpie × 2

Feral Pigeon × 1
Woodpigeon × 1

Blackbird × 1
Robin × 1
Dunnock × 2

Blue Tit × 1
Great Tit × 4
Coal Tit × 1
Long-tailed Tit × 3

Chaffinch × 5
Goldfinch × 1

It’s a rather boring list, even by suburban London standards; no sparrowhawk, nuthatch, woodpecker, siskin, greenfinch, stock dove… but never mind.

Not there’s anything wrong with genre fiction. When it’s well-written, it is the purest kind of reading pleasure; story-telling with no other purpose than to entertain.

It’s a bit like Hollywood blockbusters; a well-made blockbuster is in some ways the apotheosis of cinema. Brash, glossy, sensational entertainment may not be the most interesting or important thing that cinema can do, but it’s something cinema does uniquely well. All too often, though, I find myself sitting in the cinema watching silly, incoherent, predictable twaddle and promising myself that next time, I won’t be suckered in by the marketing, and I’ll go and see some the interesting Eastern European movie or the documentary instead.

Or the kind of junk food you think will be a self-indulgent treat, but you actually regret ordering even before you finish eating it.

And the Kindle just makes it too easy to keep buying more junk food. There’s always something heavily discounted; you can impulse buy and be reading in seconds; and the books don’t even clutter up your house.

And of course, there’s Amazon’s recommendations; they’re always telling you that if you liked X you might enjoy Y. But that doesn’t really work, for me. Because it’s the quality of the writing which matters more than the specific genre. And believe me, it doesn’t matter how much you like Georgette Heyer, other writers of historical romance are almost always disappointing. And just because you enjoy Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga, it doesn’t mean you should keep buying random books that Amazon classifies as ‘Space Opera’.

]]>http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/01/15/the-perfidious-kindle/feed/08818Red Love: The Story of an East German Family by Maxim Leohttp://heracliteanfire.net/2015/01/14/red-love-the-story-of-an-east-german-family-by-maxim-leo/
http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/01/14/red-love-the-story-of-an-east-german-family-by-maxim-leo/#respondWed, 14 Jan 2015 17:35:09 +0000http://heracliteanfire.net/?p=8806This is the family history of three generations of Germans. The author’s grandparents were young during WWII; one grandfather fought in the French Resistance, the other seems to have been a lukewarm Fascist, but both ended up being inspired by the promise of the new socialist East Germany that was going to rise out of the ruins of the war. Then his parents grew up as products of the GDR, and he was a young man when the Berlin Wall came down.

He’s got plenty of good material, and it’s well-written*, so if it sounds like the kind of thing you might like, you’ll probably like it.

* Apart from some slightly clunky tense shifts; he opens chapters in the past tense to establish the scene then switches to the present tense for the bulk of the text. Maybe it works better in German.

]]>http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/01/14/red-love-the-story-of-an-east-german-family-by-maxim-leo/feed/08806Bird of the Year 2014http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/01/14/bird-of-the-year-2014/
http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/01/14/bird-of-the-year-2014/#respondWed, 14 Jan 2015 14:52:38 +0000http://heracliteanfire.net/?p=8793I added eight birds to my life list this year, all in Portugal; including two species of vultures, five eagles, two storks, two bustards, bee-eater, roller, hoopoe, golden oriole, two kinds of shrike, two kinds of swift…

Among the species I’d seen before, highlights included Montagu’s Harrier, which is an elegant, long-winged bird of prey that I had wonderful views of; Southern Grey Shrike, which I’d seen before in Morocco and Spain, but certainly never so well; Black Stork, a species I last saw over twenty years ago on the day I did a bungee jump at Victoria Falls; Pallid Swift, because I had previously ticked it on the basis of a somewhat dodgy sighting, so a really good sighting was a weight off my mind (and also because it was picturesque to see them nesting on cliffs overhanging the sea). Bonelli’s Eagle and Golden Eagle are certainly worth mentioning as well, although neither were particularly good views.

One of the particular attractions of the trip I took was the unusual cliff-nesting storks. These are White Storks, the ones better-known for nesting on chimneys (and bringing babies). Along this particular bit of the Portuguese coast they’ve developed the habit of nesting on rocks just offshore. I think there are probably at least ten or eleven nests in this picture, although admittedly you may have to take my word for it:

You should at least be able to make out the streaks of guano, and the flying white bird with black wingtips in front of the left-hand rock. Here’s a photo, taken through binoculars, of a nest which was unusually close to the cliff:

Of the eight species I saw which were new, the least interesting was Iberian Chiffchaff: a bird which is effectively identical to the (very common, small, drab) Common Chiffchaff, but with a different song. I didn’t even definitely see one — I saw chiffchaffs that weren’t calling and heard Iberian Chiffchaff singing — but I’m ticking it on the song.

Then there was Western Bonelli’s Warbler, another little greenish bird in the same genus as the chiffchaffs. I have to say, it was a much more attractive bird in person than you would think looking at illustrations; but that’s not saying much.

Black Vulture (or Cinereous Vulture, if you want to avoid confusion with the New World species) is a cracking species — the largest bird of prey apart from the condors, with a wingspan from eight to ten feet — but again, not particularly good views. Spanish Imperial Eagle (or as my Portuguese guide tried to persuade me it was called, Iberian Imperial Eagle) is a majestic species which used to be the rarest eagle in world until good conservation work managed to upgrade it to the second rarest*; there were estimated to be 324 breeding pairs in 2012. Again, though, very distant views.

I also saw some Black-bellied Sandgrouse — the sandgrouse are ground-living desert pigeons, sort of — which was the first sandgrouse I’ve seen in Europe. And quite good views of a pair of Stone Curlew, which is a magnificent, goggle-eyed bird.

But when I booked a birding guide for a day, there were three species I particularly wanted to see: Little Bustard, Great Bustard and European Roller.

The roller is a truly spectacular species, a big electric blue bird the size of a crow with deep, royal blue patches on the wings when it flies. We spent a while watching them, and it would almost certainly be my bird of the year if it hadn’t been my winner for BOTY 2007.

Little Bustard is also a great species, and we saw them reasonably well; but my Bird of the Year 2014 has to be Great Bustard. I believe the world’s heaviest recorded flying bird was a Great Bustard; with the slight caveat that the particular individual may have been too fat to fly. On average it’s the second-heaviest, after Kori Bustard, and it’s a big beast of a thing. Here’s the distant, hazy photo I posted for BOTY:BPiaSR:

Here it is zoomed into the centre a bit, clearly showing five birds:

The two in the middle [enhance! enhance!]:

But what’s so good about bustards is what they do to attract a mate. Stick with this video for at least a couple of minutes to get the full effect:

Amazing. I didn’t get views like that, sadly, but I did see them a bit closer than in my photos, and I did see them displaying, and they are brilliant birds.

]]>http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/01/14/bird-of-the-year-2014/feed/08793Bird of the Year 2014: best performances in a supporting rolehttp://heracliteanfire.net/2015/01/09/bird-of-the-year-2014-best-performances-in-a-supporting-role/
http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/01/09/bird-of-the-year-2014-best-performances-in-a-supporting-role/#respondFri, 09 Jan 2015 15:24:11 +0000http://heracliteanfire.net/?p=8758Happy New Year, everybody.

Keen followers of the Bird of the Year Awards will notice a change in the categories this year. Butterflies and moths receive a disproportionate amount of my insecty attention, so I think it makes sense to split them out into their own category. Realistically, I could just split all invertebrates into ‘butterflies and moths’ and ‘other’, but I think it’s good to sit back at the end of the year and try to think of an interesting spider or slug or sea urchin or something.

Best Plant

I went on a lovely holiday in Portugal in the spring, and I mainly chose the timing for the flowers. Everyone goes to the Mediterranean at the wrong time of year. It may not be as hot at the end of April as it is in August, but the whole countryside is full of flowers and birdsong.

So I was walking along the Atlantic coast of Portugal, and the cliffs were covered in drifts of rockroses — pale yellow, strong yellow, white, pink — but there was also French lavender, thrift, big Spanish broom, little compact mounds of broom with pale yellow flowers, maybe eight or nine different orchids, wild gladioli, amazing vivid blue pimpernels. And sometimes I’d put my backpack down and get a great waft of wild thyme.

But I have to pick one. Among the various orchids, I was pleased to find these plants of a tongue orchid which is normally burgundy red:

But perhaps perversely, I’m not going to pick a flower; my plant of the year is the cork oak:

The numbers on the bark are to keep track of when each tree’s bark was last harvested. The combination of the dark naked trunks and greyish bark sleeves is rather charming, I think.

Best Butterfly or Moth

I made an effort to tick off a few more British butterfly species this year, and had four life firsts. But they were very much butterflies for the connoisseur; by which I mean they look… unspectacular. The names give you some idea: Essex Skipper, Small Blue, Grizzled Skipper, Dingy Skipper. The Small Blue is indeed remarkably small, but it’s not very blue; the Essex Skipper is distinguished from the Small Skipper by the colour of the undersides of the antennae; and the other two skippers are grizzled and dingy.

I also saw green hairstreak for the first time in Britain, which is a genuinely pretty butterfly, with iridescent green underwings; but I have seen them before in France. And a few attractive moths, like Clouded Buff, and this Buff Ermine, seen here on the classic habitat of a railway station toilet door:

But the winner is again from Portugal, a kind of butterfly I have wanted to see for years because it’s an exotic-looking European species not found in the UK: a Festoon. To be exact, this is a Spanish Festoon:

It’s rather a worn specimen, and it’s a terrible picture taken with my phone through my binoculars, but it’s my butterfly of the year.

Best Insect (other)

The most exciting non-lepidopteran insects I saw this year in the UK were ruby-tailed wasp (so shiny!) and velvet ant (actually a furry wingless wasp, dontcha know). Although the most photogenic might be this dor beetle:

But I also saw some good beetles in Portugal, like this spotty hairy chafer which I think is probably Oxythyrea funesta (but usually when I think I’ve identified an insect and I consult an entomologist, they tell me I would need to check its genitalia under a microscope to be sure):

And there was this grotesque mammoth which, I learned later, is an oil beetle:

But I’m going for this spiky beetle as my best insect (other) for 2014. According to the coleopterist I consulted on Twitter, it’s probably Sepidium bidentatum:

Best Invertebrate (other)

So I was walking along in Portugal and thought oh, what’s that pink flower the bumblebee is feeding on…

As it turns out, the bumblebee was not the one doing the feeding. That is a pink crab spider, possibly Thomisus onustus.

But my invertebrate of the year is the wasp spider Argiope bruennichi. These have been spreading rapidly across the south of England in the last ten years, helped by a combination of global warming and, I learn from Google, new-found genetic diversity after global warming allowed previously isolated populations to interbreed. It may be a sign of the coming apocalypse, but it’s a handsome beastie which I’ve been trying to see for a couple of years:

Best Reptile

I saw a grass snake trying to eat a frog in the woods at Bookham Common. I did take a couple of pictures of snake belly in thick grass, but they’re not worth sharing.

Best Fish

No, I’ve got nothing.

Best Amphibian

I’ve seen the usual common frogs and toads — lots of tadpoles in the pond this year — but nothing notable.

Best Mammal

An Egyptian Mongoose in Portugal. I just googled this to check, and apparently it was always assumed that these were an introduced species in Iberia — because of a lack of fossil evidence and the distance from the nearest wild African populations — but there are fossils in North Africa, and recent genetic testing suggests the Iberian mongooses are the descendants of some of those North African animals that presumably crossed over at Gibraltar in the Pleistocene, when there was no sea there.

Either way, it was a neat surprise; I didn’t know they were there.

Best Ecosystem

Obviously the Portuguese cliff-tops were great, the pine scrub was a delight, but my choice is the steppes of Alentejo, where I went with a hired bird guide for a great days birdwatching. I imagine in summer they are baked dry, but when I was there it was gently rolling green fields with flowers forming great hazy patches of colour. I only took a couple of pictures and they don’t do it justice, but here’s one I took through a telescope, admittedly with the saturation punched up a bit, that gives you some idea.

There are actually some birds in that picture, which is why I took it; but they can wait for the main Bird of the Year 2014 post.

]]>http://heracliteanfire.net/2015/01/09/bird-of-the-year-2014-best-performances-in-a-supporting-role/feed/08758The 9th [nearly] annual Christmas stuffing posthttp://heracliteanfire.net/2014/12/26/the-9th-nearly-annual-christmas-stuffing-post/
http://heracliteanfire.net/2014/12/26/the-9th-nearly-annual-christmas-stuffing-post/#commentsFri, 26 Dec 2014 22:56:56 +0000http://heracliteanfire.net/?p=8755I didn’t do one of these posts last year because my campaign to have something other than turkey for Christmas dinner finally paid off — we had beef. But we’re back to turkey this year; turkey, prunes wrapped in bacon, roast potatoes, Brussels sprouts, cranberry sauce, and two types of stuffing. Both stuffings, as usual, were made with a base of sausagemeat, bread, onion, and celery; one was chestnut and mushroom (again), and for the other one, I added pecans and dried figs steeped in Marsala. Which was very nice, though I do say so myself.

Followed by (shop-bought) Christmas pudding, which was alright, although personally I’d rather have trifle every year.

Also the Sri Lankan Christmas cake recipe I’ve done for the past two years, and a ham boiled in ginger beer and baked with a brown sugar and mustard glaze.

]]>http://heracliteanfire.net/2014/12/26/the-9th-nearly-annual-christmas-stuffing-post/feed/28755Almaty-Transit by Dana Mazurhttp://heracliteanfire.net/2014/09/17/almaty-transit-a-ghost-story-by-dana-mazur/
http://heracliteanfire.net/2014/09/17/almaty-transit-a-ghost-story-by-dana-mazur/#commentsWed, 17 Sep 2014 10:25:21 +0000http://heracliteanfire.net/?p=8730This is my book from Kazakhstan for the Read The World challenge, and it is, unusually, contemporary literary fiction (from 2010!). Which would be even more unusual if it had actually been translated from Kazakh or Russian, but it’s a novel in English by a Kazakh immigrant to the US. And the action moves between Los Angeles — where Aidar, a Kazakh man, lives with his American musician wife and son — and Almaty where his mother lives.

[SPOILER ALERT, I guess; the event mentioned happens pretty early in the book, but if you don’t want to know the result, look away now]

The full title of the book is Almaty-Transit — A Ghost Story, and most of the action happens after the death of Aidar, when his spirit finds itself back home in Kazakhstan, but wanting to find some way to help his wife and child back in the States. It’s hard to give any more detail without getting even more spoilery, but I would say that for much of the book the supernatural part is handled well, and it seems like an extension of a character-driven narrative, rather than wacky stuff happening just to try and make the book more interesting. By the end, as the supernatural elements got more elaborate and more gothic fairy-tale in tone, I was starting to get a bit impatient with it, but it wasn’t enough to spoil the book for me.

So, yeah, on the whole I enjoyed this, I thought it was well-written and the characters were engaging, even though the thing which is most distinctive about it — the supernatural side of the story — was in some ways the least appealing part, for me.